Introduction: Social Networking

Author: Ian Darwin
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FormatLanguage: WikiFormat

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Discussion:

In the second decade of this century, nobody writing about the internet would underestimate the importance of social networking. Dominated as it is by a few major sites - Facebook and Twitter being the biggest of the big - social networking provides both an opportunity for developers and a missed opportunity for the developer community as a whole. Certainly there are still opportunities for creative use of social networking. But what is missing (despite valiant efforts) is a single "open social networking" API that would include authorization, messaging, and media interchange.

This chapter provides a few how-tos on accessing the two named sites, using plain HTTP (they all originated as web-based sites just before the explosion of mobile apps) and using more comprehensive but more-specific APIs.